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By the time Alexis died, early in 1676, Russia had made its mark as a European power. Denmark wanted it to join in a coalition against Sweden; Poland wanted its aid against the Tatars; the Emperor wanted it to join in coalition against the Turks. But in 1682 the unexpectedly early death without issue of his successor, his eldest son, Fedor, raised doubts about Russia’s political stability once again. Of the two obvious candidates to succeed Fedor, Ivan, Alexis’s surviving son by his first wife, was handicapped, and Peter, Alexis’s son by his second wife, though healthy and intelligent, was only eight years old. This exacerbated the tensions which already existed at court between the old guard, including the last tsar’s chief minister, Artamon Matveyev, and ambitious younger men like Vasilii Golitsyn and Ivan Khovanskii. ³⁶ This might not have mattered if two domestic problems had not now come to a head.

Discontented elements came to the fore, each with its own agenda but united against innovation. Religious conservatives had been outraged by the confirmation in 1666 of changes to the liturgy. The ‘Old Believers’ would not be reconciled to them. At the same time there was widespread concern in the ranks of traditional army units, including the privileged musketeer corps, about modernization of the army. Many soldiers saw this as a threat; and many of them were also Old Believers, armed and stationed in the Kremlin. Their commander was the ambitious Ivan Khovanskii. The upshot was rebellion. On 15 May 1682 — the anniversary of the death of the Tsarevich Dmitrii at Uglich nearly a century before — false rumours spread that Ivan, the rightful tsar, had been murdered. Three days of blood-shed followed in the seat of government itself Matveyev was butchered; so were the Kremlin’s foreign doctors, along with other foreigners. The mob’s attentions may seem to have been indiscriminate, but all the victims represented modernization in one or another of its forms. When order returned, Ivan and Peter reigned jointly, with Alexis’s eldest daughter, Sofia, as regent. After an interval, Khovanskii and others involved in the rebellion were executed, and leading Old Believers were burned at the stake. The attempt to reverse the modernization policies was thwarted; the government’s attention returned to foreign affairs.

The first priority was to establish a permanent peace with Poland. This was done in Moscow in the spring of 1686. The Poles ratified all the territorial transfers they had conceded at Andrusovo. They also ceded Kiev permanently to Russia in return for a payment of less than 150,000 rubles. Poland’s king, Jan Sobieski, the ‘hero of the siege of Vienna’ only three years earlier, tried to avoid ratifying the treaty, but had to sign in the end. Russia’s only concession apart from the money was a promise to attack the Crimea. Two campaigns in successive years were failures, but that did not alter the fact that Russia had replaced Poland as the predominant power in the region; and the success was due in no small measure to superior diplomatic methods, and to a succession of particularly able professional functionaries.

Although the political direction of foreign affairs in the later 1600s had been overseen by a succession of able ministers — Afanasii Ordyn-Nashchokin, Artamon Matveyev, Vasilii Golitsyn — their success was based largely on the strength of the support they received from those below. By the 1680s the Foreign Office had a staff of over forty translators and interpreters working in a variety of languages, chiefly Latin, Tatar, German and Polish, but also Persian, Swedish, Dutch, Greek, Mongol and English. ³⁷There was an even bigger cohort of clerks, and, above them were the senior officials. The permanent secretary at the time of the Andrusovo negotiations rejoiced in the name of ‘Diamond Johnson’ (Almaz Ivanov), ‘Diamond’ being his family name; his family were business people. He began his association with government in the 1620s, supervising the liquor outlets, and in the late 1630s he was in charge of customs and the liquor monopoly. He subsequently became Secretary in the state’s main fiscal department before entering the Foreign Office in 1646. He served on embassies to Sweden and to Poland in the early 1650s, before being promoted to membership of the cabinet (duma — by now essentially a committee of the Tsar’s chief ministers) as professional head of the Foreign Office. At the same time he was given responsibility for the State Printing Office. This was a particularly sensitive job in that it involved publishing translations of foreign books which contained essential expertise which Russia needed, but which were viewed with horror by most Russians, who, perhaps rightly, imagined that such learning threatened their faith.